Digger

The Warner Bros. publicity department would like reviews of Digger, the much-anticipated dark comedy from Tom Cruise and acclaimed filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu, to remain as spoiler-free as possible. This admittedly poses a challenge, in that the biggest swings and most prominent shortcomings of the film fall into the spoiler category. What I can say is the film achieves the usual galumphing too-much-ness that has won the director two Oscars while leaving critics like me baffled about how seriously he is taken in some quarters.

As for what I can’t say, at least until after the film has been in theaters for a while: Instead of giving away details, I will call these plot twists a “reveal.”

The film opens with a heavily prosthetics-laden Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a grotesque Texas oil billionaire who is seemingly incapable of processing any bad news, whether it’s the sad state of his beloved cat, who is clearly on its tenth life by now, or a massive fire breaking out at one of his company’s oil rigs off the coast of Greenland. That disaster leads to the coast itself breaking off and floating toward Europe, where tsunamis and other catastrophes threaten to follow.

There’s little encouragement to be found from the American president (John Goodman) and his cabinet of lackeys, who either offer ridiculous solutions (nuke it!) or scramble to exploit the pending disaster for U.S. interests. None of these powerful men are any more apt than Digger to listen to the one sane man in the room: Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the chief scientist at Rockwell Energy. And as environmental apocalypse looms, a reveal. And then another reveal.

The twists won’t necessarily come as a surprise to longtime viewers of Iñárritu, whose recent films Birdman and Bardo both play around with concepts of reality and the parameters of artificiality in conveying reality. But where legendary film director Ernst Lubitsch was famous for his “touch,” Iñárritu’s aesthetic style is more akin to a Godzilla-sized stomp. His characters scream and bluster and carry on, his dialogue (the director shares screen credit with a total of four other collaborators) makes its point and makes it again with a thudding lack of nuance, and what we’re left with is less pointed satire than it is despair-riddled doomscrolling.

The performances can’t generally be evaluated as successful or unsuccessful, mainly because of the reveals, but Ahmed manages to find some grace notes of comedy when all around him is bombast. As for Cruise’s much-discussed turn, the actor unquestionably puts in the work, playing a character well outside his wheelhouse. The problem is that it’s work — Cruise is a performer capable of understatement, of steely intensity, even of wit in the right project, but what mostly emerges in Digger is the grunting and the groaning of someone who wants to let you know how much labor they’re expending.

The MVPs here, without question, are production designers Dennis Gassner (1917) and Richard Johnson (The Underground Railroad), whose eye for detail in Digger’s world — his over-the-top mansion, the oil rig he turns into his personal disaster headquarters — tells us more about the character than any line of dialogue, and as Iñárritu piles on the reveals, they’re right there with him. Working in concert with costumer Jacqueline West (Killers of the Flower Moon) and regular Iñárritu cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki, they craft one of the film’s most visually audacious sequences, in which Digger must defend himself before an angry European Council, the members of which are wearing clothes that match the color of the chamber walls, rendering them anonymous and nearly invisible before Digger’s swagger.

What’s perhaps most off-putting about the mounting twists is that, clearly, Iñárritu thinks he’s making a hilarious movie and can’t imagine that the audience would disagree; compare this to Pedro Almodóvar placing pointed criticism of his own work in the mouth of a sympathetic character in Bitter Christmas. Iñárritu seems to think he’s made another Dr. Strangelove, but if anything, Digger comes off as an even more heavy-handed and dire Don’t Look Up.

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Screenwriters: Alejandro G. Iñárritu & Alexander Dinelaris & Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman; story by Sabina Berman & Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Jez Butterworth
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Executive producer: Joshua Grode
Producers: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Mary Parent, Tom Cruise
Director of photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production design: Dennis Gassner, Richard Johnson
Editing: Conor O’Neill, Stephen Mirione
Music: Cosmo Sheldrake
Sound design: Johnnie Burn, re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor (UK); Richard King, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures
In English
128 minutes